(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of storage devices, more specifically, the present invention is a method and an apparatus for virtual disk simulation.
(2) Related Art
Memory as related to a computer system is all of the addressable storage space in a processing unit and other internal storage that is used to execute instructions. A typical computer system has various sources of storage including it's own hard disk space, portable memory such as a floppy diskette and remote disk space accessed through a network. Remote disk space such as those accessible through a network may be made to appear as local storage through currently available memory management software including Network File Systems (NFS). Thus, current computer systems have virtually unlimited memory available to them and may support various requests for additional memory not available on its hard disk. However, a computer system can not support a request for a large contiguous disk space if all that is available is a collection of smaller local and remote individual disk storage units.
It is therefore desirable to have a method and an apparatus for applications running on a computer system to transparently access disk space which appears to the applications as being contiguous and in the size that is required by the applications.